bobjonkman favorited something by natecull: Dear everyone who is considering making a video of yourself talking rather than just writing the *exact same words* into a text file, a blog post or a PDF:Unless you're specifically targeting people who literally cannot read...Please don't.Sincerely, A Person Who Doesn't Have Literal Free Hours To Hear You Slooooowly […]

bobjonkman favorited something by kensanata: I recommend people just turn off voice assistants whenever they can. That includes smart watches and the like! If you don’t depend on them, then there always the chance of activating them by mistake and of voice samples getting sent and stored where they don’t belong and listened to by […]

bobjonkman favorited something by wolfie: @ink_slinger also "blood is thicker than water" is actually short for "The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb" which means that friendship formed in hardship is stronger than family bonds, the exact opposite of the shorthandAnd curiosity killed the cat used to stop people […]

bobjonkman favorited something by inkslinger: "Pull yourself up by your bootstraps" was originally satire because that is, um, impossible. It's now stated without irony."Just a few bad apples," when referring to police, conveniently ignoring the full aphorism ials actually: One bad apple *spoils the bunch.*

Primarily Perfect People are Permitted to Perfunctorily Pass this Post .

The rest of us, Prone to Pecadillos, may occasionally write blogposts and then change our minds about the content. When that happens it’s best not to make changes or delete posts without letting your readers know.

Instead of making a wholesale change to a post it’s better to create a new post. Imagine if someone wrote about a similar issue, quoted from your post and provided links to it. Now your post has changed, and the links no longer make sense because the content has changed. Or someone makes a comment on a post, the content of the post is changed, and now the comment has nothing to do with the post.

Instead, create a new post with a new link. It’s a good idea to keep the original post; you could delete it, but then other people’s links would return an error (that’s called “link rot”).

About the only good reason for modifying an existing post is to correct an error. Even then you shouldn’t delete the incorrect material, but indicate it should be deleted by using the <del> tag, and marking the new material with an <ins> tag. For example:

The Javan Rhinoceros <del>has only one survivor </del> <ins> is now extinct</ins> in Vietnam.

This would show with crossed-out text for <del> and highlighted text for <ins>, like this:

The Javan Rhinoceros has only one survivoris now extinct in Vietnam.

(which is a sad development, and may be worthy of a post of its own).

If you really want to delete a post then replace it with text like “This post has been removed by the author”. If you do that then you should delete or hide the comments too.

These are open and transparent ways to indicate deletions. It’s merely an online publishing convention, since there really isn’t a style guide for HTML like Strunk and White’s in the online world. Or, more accurately, there are far too many Strunk and White’s in the online world!